The Results

80-95% reduction in ad trafficking and launch time

Decreased time needed to launch ad campaigns

Decreased campaign build time to within 30 minutes

Teaming up with digital pros

If you’ve ever danced your heart out at a summertime music festival, or lost your voice during an arena concert, chances are you’ve attended an AEG Presents show. Each year, AEG Presents promotes thousands of events from live contemporary tours to multi-day festivals. Historically, AEG Presents promoted these events through traditional offline and local advertising campaigns, but the company wanted to expand its marketing efforts and scale its digital presence.

AEG Presents teamed up with Fetch, a global digital marketing agency, to launch campaigns to sell tickets for all of their events online. Since these different campaigns had a wide range of objectives — from awareness to direct response — Fetch had to implement multiple strategies. The agency applied a robust but scaled approach using retargeting, in-market affinity, whitelists, custom affinity, site category, contextual, programmatic direct deals, and first-party custom audience segmentation.

Creating an automated process

AEG Presents worked with Fetch to define a campaign brief template in a shared project management platform. This contained all of the event details AEG Presents would be promoting, the campaign budget and flight details, as well as links to creative.

AEG Presents required Fetch to be able to launch thousands of programmatic campaigns in 2017. Traditional processes would require a team of over 15 full time hires designated to this task alone. Efficiency was the answer, and Fetch was ready for the challenge. We wanted to transform our campaign creation workflow to increase AEG Presents’ speed in launching new campaigns.

Ana Nichols,
Account Director,
Fetch

Fetch then built a process to feed information from AEG Presents in structured files that can be uploaded into Google Display & Video 360, as well as Fetch’s internal database, FetchMe. This significantly reduced the time it took to create event ad campaigns. The new process worked across programmatic display, video, and YouTube TrueView campaigns — all powered by structured information files. Fetch used a similar process for campaigns in Google Search Ads 360 and other channels.

This automated process made onboarding new members of the growing team simple with an intuitive UI. It also allowed AEG Presents to embrace a mindset of constant improvement, where the company could implement process changes in a controlled way to increase the channel value and quality.

Increasing productivity, reducing ad-trafficking time

The company saw a reduction in ad-trafficking and launch time of 80-95% in Display & Video 360, and FetchMe. The process also increased campaign quality by making input errors obsolete.

The improvements made in automation have reduced the time needed for execution, allowing for an increased focus on campaign strategy and optimization. With automation, we’re able to ensure tailored best-in-class digital marketing for every event promoted by AEG Presents.

Matt Ferrel,
Head of Media,
AEG Presents

A single operator with accurate information from AEG Presents in the shared project management platform can now traffic and launch an event ad campaign very quickly, and with a high confidence in the quality of work. The approach has also decreased campaign build time across Display & Video 360 from six to eight hours per event to within 30 minutes (depending on campaign complexity). For a company that often launches hundreds of campaigns per week, this has made a significantly positive impact on productivity and overall efficiency.